i fell asleep trying to watch this 3 different times

Storyline: the plants, wind, and trees get pissed off at humans and send out some bacteria that causes people to kill themselves in sometimes disturbing, and sometimes hilarious ways.

Some of the mass suicide scenes were legitimately creepy - which is why it gets two stars, not one.  But the rest is weak.  This is not Marky Mark's best effort.  And the steady stream of narrator hints points to the fact that the plot wasn't very well put together.

This is my latest offering from the local Red Box. It will be my last review of an M. Night Shyamalan movie. I know he'd prefer it if his work was referred to as "film", but this one, "The Happening", along with his last few movies would make the kind of bed time short stories that the child who is being read to would ask the reader to stop reading because it was putting him or her to sleep, which is what the reader would be aiming for and the child would not.

Drummond does a good job of telegraphing this utter nonsense in the review below, but I can add a few things. First, when this drivel came to an end, I clicked on "deleted scenes" and the entire movie ran again...as in...the entire movie should have been deleted. One thought that came to mind was that Shyamalan was testing his name brand with this one. M. Night? This one really sucked. He wasn't even betting on himself. He wouldn't flip a dime for a real monster. He used homeless people to shake tree branches and wind machines. THAT'S it! I really tried to let the wind scare me. I stared at my house plants, wondering if they, too, were plotting against me. Nahhhhhhhhhh.

The concept is dated (see Drummond's review). What's next, M. Night? "Attack of the Killer Dirt"? "Night of the Empty FrankenBerry Boxes"? "Beware of the Clothes Your Wearing"? I was waiting for some kind of Sir Graves Ghastly-like character to pop up saying,"Ooooooohhhhhhh...isn't THAT scary, kids? Ooooooooooohhhhhh..."

Paid a buck, as usual. Was well worth it for the closure on Shyamalan's career. Stark put it nicely: "If we had purchased "The Happening", it would have been donated to the library the next day." Unworthy of a place in our permanent collection...which contains few real stinkers.

It's by that director with the name that sounds like it's East Indian (probably because it's East Indian). He peaked with The Sixth Sense. So it starts with, oh, did I mention there would be spoilers? There will be. I mean, the movie's predictable from moment one, so maybe there are no spoilers. So it starts with people in Central Park (that's in New York City) stopping. The wind blows through the trees (trees, that's important - trees) and the people all freeze, start walking backwards, then start killing themselves. So, there are lots of scenes of people killing themselves. Their brains aren't working, but they come up with some very creative ways of killing themselves throughout the movie.

Yeah, it gets tedious. See, that's why I mentioned the part about the cell phone. I forget the word for the cinematic technique of prepping the audience for something later in the movie. You know, like a character pointing out a haystack under a barn loft so you won't be too skeptical when the hero falls out of the loft during a fight scene only to fall on a haystack instead of breaking his bones. Well, this move gives you plenty of those, whatever they're called, early on. The hero, in his classroom, asks his class to speculate as to why the bees are disappearing across the continent. And one seemingly dumb student shows his hidden depth by suggesting it's one of those "mysteries of nature which we'll never figure out." I guess that's the Indian guy's (or the Indian sounding name guy's) way of telling us we're never going to really learn why the people are killing themselves when the wind blows through the leaves.

We get another one of those cinematic revealing thingies when somebody talks about how tobacco plants have evolved a defense where they release some chemicals to attract crickets to eat the caterpillars. See, the plants are defending themselves. Only, they aren't walking around like triffids. They're using psychotropic chemicals to create wind which makes people walk backwards and kill themselves.

Oh, and there's this couple. The main two characters. They have a troubled marriage (she had dessert with another man. Dessert. Really!). But as we know from the other 500 apocalyptic movies we've seen, when the chips are down they get to see the real person in their partners, the personas that truly matter. And by the time the crisis is over, millions of people may be dead, but it's a happy ending because love conquers all.

Oh, damn! I've spoiled the ending!

Three stars. One for Zooey Deschanel's piercing bratty eyes. Another for the Indian guy's willingness to avoid sugar coating his tragedy by killing off kids as well as adults. And a third star for the performance of the old woman in the last part of the movie who was creepy even without the plant-induced evil and really was the scariest part of the movie. I don't know what inspired that sequence, but I could have seen that alone and come away satisfied. Basically, the Indian guy introduced his own Deliverance theme as the characters fled to the most rural corner of Pennsylvania they could find.

Did anybody watching the film come away afraid of trees and grass?

I never did see The Lady in the Water.